London's stockbroker belt doesn't get much plusher than Oxshott. A leafy Surrey village of imposing residences bordered by heathland and Oxshott Woods, it ranks as the capital's most expensive suburb, home to the likes of PR guru Max Clifford, golfer Colin Montgomerie and half the Chelsea first team.

And Oxshott doesn't get much plusher than the Crown Estate. Here, at the end of sweeping gravelled driveways, massive modern-day mansions stand in well-tended grounds of an acre or more apiece, their entrances barred by wrought-iron gates topped with a CCTV camera. The average house here will fetch £3m, many a good deal more.

Outside one, a multi-gabled faux-farmhouse with mullioned windows, an officer of the Surrey constabulary has been stationed on and off for the last week. This is where the former male model turned entrepreneur Ian Griffin lived, and a few days back, a patrol car pulled up alongside the luxury Polish-registered Mercedes on the drive and disgorged a team of police forensic officers in white overalls. They spent several hours inside.

It is a long way from the opulence of this mansion to a flimsy two-man tent in woodland outside Macclesfield, which is where Griffin was finally arrested by Cheshire police on Monday. He had been sought for almost a week after the death in Paris of his girlfriend, a Polish-born businesswoman called Kinga Legg.

It is a journey, though, that Griffin should have every opportunity to recount. Yesterday he appeared in a London court at an extradition hearing. Although he refused consent to be extradited, and was remanded in custody until next week, he seems destined to eventually be returned to France, where the Paris public prosecutor has opened an inquiry for murder. Griffin, 40, had been the object of an international manhunt after Legg's body was discovered by a chambermaid on the evening of Tuesday 26 May in the bath of suite 503 at the Hotel Bristol on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

The 36-year-old businesswoman ran a hugely successful Polish firm, exporting more than 300m tomatoes each season to restaurant chains such as McDonald's, and major supermarkets including Tesco and the French giant Carrefour. The company, Vegex, is based in Opatówek, Poland, with a UK base in Oxshott.

A millionaire several times over, Legg appears to have stopped off in Paris for a few days on the way to Port Leucate on the Mediterranean, about 15 miles from Perpignan, where a few days earlier a professional skipper had docked a black 65ft Sunseeker motor yacht that had been chartered in her name. She checked in to the hotel on the morning of Saturday 23 May. With its period furniture, Gobelins tapestries and Baccarat crystal chandeliers, the hotel has long been a favourite with politicians, tycoons and film stars.

Legg was joined later on Saturday by Griffin. According to the French media, the couple rejected the first room they were offered and settled on suite 503, at a rate of €1,000 a night. "They appear to have drunk a great deal, throughout the weekend," says a spokesman at the Paris Brigade Criminelle, or serious crimes squad, which is handling the investigation. "They went to a great many bars. Someone plainly had money to burn."

Nothing untoward was noticed until Monday night, when the couple reportedly had a furious row in a smart restaurant on the avenue Georges V. Griffin is said to have returned to the hotel alone, Legg following some time later.

The next morning, a male voice called reception from the room to say: "Madame Legg does not want to be disturbed today." It was only after persistent requests from Legg's father that a member of the Bristol's staff entered the suite, at about 8pm. The scene, according to the Brigade Criminelle's Henri Moreau, was shocking. "She had been severely beaten with a blunt instrument," Moreau says."Perhaps the foot of a lampstand."

Legg and Griffin had been together for over a year, although their paths may have first crossed long before. Born Kinga Wolf, Legg came to England in 1995 to marry Peter Legg, a civil servant from Preston in Lancashire whom she had met on the rather unlikely occasion of a town twinning ceremony. The couple exchanged letters for nearly a year before finally marrying in Blackpool register office.

Kinga studied for a masters in international marketing at the University of Central Lancashire, got a grant to study advanced farming methods in the US, and seems to have worked very effectively at establishing trading links between the family firm in Poland and British fruit and vegetable importers. The marriage, however, lasted only two years.

By now what the local press called "a glamorous fixture on the well-heeled Cheshire social scene", Legg developed a taste for a champagne-fuelled high life as Vegex, which she took over fully in 2003, really began to take off. For two years, she lived with another businessman, 30 years her senior, in a luxury flat in Wilmslow.

Then she and Griffin got together. Griffin had grown up in Warrington, the son of a surveyor. He had by this stage made - and, it seems, lost - a lot of money, on a string of ventures ranging from tanning salons to gadget shops and mobile phone ringtones. His cousin, Joey Edgerton, describes him as "the sort of person who makes money and then loses it and then makes it again. He could set up a business from scratch."

Perhaps the entrepreneur's most bizarre moneymaker was an "Osama pin Laden" doll launched by his Gadgetmasters chain in the wake of 9/11. In 2002, Griffin was reported to be making over £10,000 a week selling the £9.99 cloth effigies of the al-Qaida leader. The doll, complete with "stress-relieving pins", sold heavily particularly in America, with 15% of sales generated going to a disaster relief fund.

"We did the test run and everybody accepted it without any backchat," Griffin said proudly at the time. "There was no bad-mouthing, so we went with it. Apparently, it's been huge in America. I would say that nine out of 10 people laugh at it, and see it as their way of giving something back."

Some of his ideas didn't go down so well. A keyring bugging device, for example, led to a deluge of angry calls and letters. "I got hate mail from men after that," Griffin once said. Nonetheless, the firm's website - its most expensive offering was a £96m US-built submarine complete with pool, ballroom and casino - was getting over a million hits a week, with film director Guy Ritchie, Manchester United footballers and Coronation Street actors among its satisfied customers. Griffin owned an orange Lamborghini.

But by 2005, Griffin, who once claimed to be worth £46m, had by all accounts lost a mint, reputedly on a US property deal that went wrong. But he remained buoyant: an entry on the Friends Reunited website boasts of "my incredible successes over the past 17 years" and teases his former schoolmates. "I have read all your notes," it says, "and to be quite frank, none of you sorry lot have accomplished anything apart from babies, dogs and goldfish."

The couple lived for a while in Knutsford, Cheshire, before moving to Oxshott last September; Legg reportedly paid a year's rent in advance on their new executive home. Friends have told the press that they had become engaged, or that at any rate Legg was determined Griffin should marry her, and that the planned luxury Mediterranean yacht trip was intended as a prelude to such an announcement.

But it was a stormy, relationship: Surrey police have confirmed that both Legg and Griffin were briefly arrested last October after an incident in which she apparently tried to stab him with a knife. Friends of the couple have said they drank heavily, and took sleeping pills and antidepressants. Others have told of a fight last April in which Griffin supposedly ended up with a cut and bleeding face after Legg caught him with a ring.

Whatever the truth, it seems the relationship reached breaking point on that Monday in Paris. A long-standing girlfriend of Griffin's, Tracey Baker, has told the press that he called her late that evening to say he and Legg had fought. "He sounded really upset and said she had attacked him with a stun gun disguised as a lipstick. He said he had cuts all over his arms and bruises all over his legs. That was the last time I spoke to him." Baker said she and Griffin were together for two-and a-half-years, until he left her for Legg, adding that the entrepreneur had been "depressed and anxious" about his business affairs. But he was not, she insisted, "a violent or aggressive man".

A "stun gun disguised as a lipstick" may sound far-fetched, but a quick internet trawl reveals the existence of just such a device, available in a range of attractive finishes including pink or gold and packing, according to its proud makers, a punch of up to 350,000V - seven times the shock delivered by a police Taser.

After Legg's body was discovered, French police thought at first that Griffin might be making for the chartered yacht, but it now looks plain that he headed home. He picked up clothing and some other possessions from the Oxshott mansion, and dropped in on a marina in Shepperton on the Thames, apparently wanting to pick up his speedboat.

Ruby Lewis of Lindon Lewis Marine, a chandlery and repair firm based in the marina, sold him a set of CD-roms containing charts of British and European waters at about 2pm on Wednesday 27 May. Lewis says that he had called by several days earlier to ask for the 18ft water-sports boat, Madog, to be pulled out of the water and given a coat of antifouling paint. He also wanted a marine satnav system fitted.

"He said he was going away and needed the work done quickly," Lewis says. When he came back on the Wednesday, dressed in jeans, a grey T-shirt and a beanie hat, "he seemed agitated when I told him the work hadn't been completed." He asked instead if he might be able to buy a small cabin cruiser, but left before a member of the company's sales team could speak to him.

Griffin then seems to have abandoned all thoughts of going anywhere by boat, got back in his car, and driven north, to an altogether earlier home. He left a clear credit card trail, and the Porsche was recovered last Thursday from outside his parents' home in Cheshire. The entrepreneur himself was finally arrested at 3.30pm on Monday, in woods near Chelford, not far from Macclesfield, close to where he had abandoned his car and within walking distance of the house where lived when he first met Legg. He appeared, a Cheshire police officer explained, to have been been sleeping rough "for quite a few days". A long way from Oxshott.